Thanks for signing up! You might also like these other newsletters:

Someone is diagnosed with a blood cancer like leukemia every four minutes, and someone dies from a blood cancer every 10 minutes. Leukemia causes more deaths for patients under age 20 than any other cancer.

And there’s no doubt that when a celebrity talks about struggling with a particular disease, people sit up and listen.

Raising awareness of leukemia can not only help people recognize the symptoms early, but also help raise funds to find a cure and support people who have the disease.

How Celebrities Raise Leukemia Awareness

For leukemia, awareness of the disease was recently raised by NBA hall of fame star and former player for the Los Angeles Lakers, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In November 2009, he announced a diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukemia. He told ESPN in November that when he first received the diagnosis, he thought it would be a death sentence. Leukemia also made the headlines when in 2006 actor Bruno Kirby died at age 57 within weeks of his leukemia diagnosis.

Other celebrities such as the late musician Mary Travers from Peter, Paul, and Mary, and actor Evan Handler from the television show Sex and the City have also struggled with leukemia. Travers died in 2009 from complications related to her leukemia treatment.

But Abdul-Jabbar has been able to manage his illness with an oral medication. He has encouraged people to be proactive, go to the doctor, get their blood checked, and to take medication if they’ve been diagnosed with leukemia.

Encouraging words from celebrities like him can go a long way toward improving the outcomes of disease.

“Whenever a high-profile person is touched by a serious disease, it raises awareness about the disease among the general public,” says Andrea Greif, a spokeswoman for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in White Plains, N.Y. That leads to more government funding and private donations.

Getting Funding for Leukemia Research

Funding for the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute doubled between 1999 and 2003, but since then the funding has remained flat. When you take inflation into consideration, the purchasing power today is about 20 percent less than it was in 2003, says George Dahlman, senior vice president of public policy for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

“There’s clearly too little funding,” especially when you consider that acute myeloid leukemia is one of the deadliest cancers, he says. But when there’s more awareness about leukemia, whether it’s raised by celebrities or not, it puts pressure on Congress to make a difference, Dahlman says.

Funding goes to researchers who are working on targeted therapies for leukemia and other blood cancers, developing vaccines for blood cancers, and looking for safer ways to perform stem cell transplants, Greif says.

It helped researchers discover a new chemotherapy agent called Gleevec, which increased the survival rate for those with chronic myelogenous leukemia from less than 40 percent to more than 95 percent, she says. This type of research also helped introduce autologous stem cell transplants, which uses the patient’s own stem cells to help recover from intense chemotherapy or radiation.

And raising awareness helps people who have leukemia find support they need, including financial support, from organizations like LLS and others. It also makes people aware of the need for bone marrow donation.

Until there is a cure for leukemia, there’s always more that can be done to raise awareness.